Transformer-Driven Inverse Problem Transform for Fast Blind Hyperspectral Image Dehazing

Hyperspectral dehazing (HyDHZ) has become a crucial signal processing technology to facilitate the subsequent identification and classification tasks, as the airborne visible/infrared imaging spectrometer (AVIRIS) data portal reports a massive portion of haze-corrupted areas in typical hyperspectral remote sensing images. The idea of inverse problem transform (IPT) has been proposed in recent remote sensing literature in order to reformulate a hardly tractable inverse problem (e.g., HyDHZ) into a relatively simple one. Considering the emerging spectral super-resolution (SSR) technique, which spectrally upsamples multispectral data to hyperspectral data, we aim to solve the challenging HyDHZ problem by reformulating it as an SSR problem. Roughly speaking, the proposed algorithm first automatically selects some uncorrupted/informative spectral bands, from which SSR is applied to spectrally upsample the selected bands in the feature space, thereby obtaining a clean hyperspectral image (HSI). The clean HSI is then further refined by a deep transformer network to obtain the final dehazed HSI, where a global attention mechanism is designed to capture nonlocal information. There are very few HyDHZ works in existing literature, and this article introduces the powerful spatial–spectral transformer into HyDHZ for the first time. Remarkably, the proposed transformer-driven IPT-based HyDHZ (T2HyDHZ) is a blind algorithm without requiring the user to manually select the corrupted region. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of T2HyDHZ with less color distortion.